A reader backs me up against the dissenter:
I think your reader who pointed out the relatively small number of Muslims worldwide actively involved with terrorism is deliberately missing the forest for the trees when it comes to Islamic extremism. The real issue it seems to me is not that the Muslim faith in the abstract is any more or less violent or oppressive than Christianity or any other religion, but rather that in the modern world, the only examples of theocratic government currently being sustained happen to be built upon Islam rather than anything else.
When a religious doctrine and a polity become one and the same, the kind of horrifyingly oppressive regimes we see around the world that foment and legitimize the fundamentalism of these latest terrorists is almost guaranteed. I remember reading something on this blog before about how fatwas against cartoonists who depict Mohammad are justified by some in part because of a lack of understanding of free speech, that Muslims under theocratic rule assume that if those cartoonists weren’t speaking for our government, than our government would silence them. It’s just an example of how these two governing philosophies, ours and that of say Saudi Arabia or Iran, can’t coexist peacefully.
Regardless of whether or not these particular terrorists were tied to any larger group or just influenced by the same rhetoric, this kind of violence will continue for as long as the separation of church and state is a foreign concept to so much of the world.
That’s what I mean by a religious war. It’s war between the extremes of fundamentalist Islam and the free, secular West. That war can exist inside the mind of a single young fanatic who, merely with access to the web and guns and pressure cookers, can stop the world in its tracks. Or it can take the form of sectarian violence in Iraq.
My reader is correct that this is not reducible to Islam in all its breadth and complexity and history. But it cannot be understood at all without grasping the fundamentalist Jihadist mindset. The uncle of the two Jihadists could not be more emphatic that he as a Muslim feels utterly violated and offended by what these losers did. He says he feels ashamed. He is a Muslim as well. And he is an American through and through.
We have to make a simple distinction: between being a Muslim and being an apocalyptic self-proclaimed Jihadist. But the latter exist, are very real, and are inspired by a toxic distortion of Islam.
The Dish 